No more laundry.

It's a mortuary fact that dead bodies should not be buried without a banana. Most of the dead people around our town drink too much coffee and spout their mouths out in public, then they just die, die, and the explosive parts of their personality gather energy.

For example, Hilda Benderhole used to have the most terrible intergestion about the way my dog urinated all over her flowers. We all know that flowers need the dogs, especially in a drought. When Hilda died, her husband wouldn't even use those flowers for her gravesite. Bad Muju.

Well, Hilda rang the bell a few days later. (Our town still puts bell wire in the caskets because we had that issue with the last Mayor). Hilda rang and rang the bell, which is now electronic and requires the AAA batteries laid down in mismatched polarities. The batteries resemble Charlie Chocolate's grandparents who all shared one bed, face to feet, so that they never got the Senior version of Frisky.

Hilda is buzzing that bell for hours and hours. The bellwire goes to the Police because they are paid to care. Only our Police were being loaned out to neighboring Salinas because they actually use them while the people of Purdy do not.

We all have weapons at all times because we call them tools. We call guns 'food makers' , knives are 'food carvers', box blade knives are 'food openers' etc. etc. We cannot steal from one another since that incident with the church plate and the fingers that came off with lopers. Our town doesn't believe in bail, defense lawyers or most of the Last Constitution. We like the 1215 Magna Carta version that was easier to read.

Next, Hilda rang her husband. After two days of waiting, Ol' Joe Benderhole was out at the local coffeehouse, showing his farmer tan to the ladies and asking for extra whip cream on his fancy Euro-trash coffee. Man needed some intimacy after forty years with Hilda, we get it. But why does Ol' Joe Benderhole have to ask for extra whip cream on the coffee? He licks it slow as he talks, hoping that someone likes his technique. The man is disgusting. My kids are always watching.

The circuit from Hilda's coffin went to the Police, then her husband, and finally the church. Our church doesn't exactly meet daily, (unless you want to stab your spouse in their sleep or something). We _might_ have a potluck on a wednesday because there is one homeless guy in town and he's too proud to take our leftovers. This inspires my children to say "Ham-oit doesn't eat them and so why should we?"

I tap their knuckles with a wooden spoon and say: "Spaghetti taste better on the second day!"

Everyone _knows_ that, except Ham-oit who has no refrigerator.

Hilda is ringing her bell during the Daily Show, and then the Tonight Show, and then the Late-Late-Show. She hasn't figured out that people need down time. The times of the day when they just zone out. This is the reason that door-to-door salesmen fail in our town. We are all very busy now that entertainment is streaming. We might even wet the couch if the plot is thick enough.

Doo-To-Door Upholstery cleaners do very well in our town. Jimmy is a former convict and we trust that we can leave the house and let him clean all our urine soaked sofas. He can even go clean around my wife's jewelery in the master bedroom. He can see where the family does its business. He is mostly cleaning around our town's hound dogs. A properly trained dog can put eighty pounds of affection on Jimmy as soon as he puts the wrong thing in his cleaning jumpsuit. But Jimmy's Convict Carpet & Upholstery Service doesn't have to ring the doorbell. He doesn't have to knock because he is so busy that everyone meets his appointments faithfully.

After several days of not eating, ringing her stupid bell like we were her servants, Hilda is probably fishing around for some water. The Soledad Prison officials tell us that people can withstand solitary confinement for a nearly a week before they get some really psychotic dreams. The Boy Scouts say that you only get three days without water.

We listen to the Boy Scouts more than the prison and always put in a brass carafe that was used for the monthly Last Supper, the um... communion thing (a pyx). We usually buy another brass pyx on Amazon after a death. We used to just burry people dry but there was that situation with the Steven's boy, who had become a Buddhist. He didn't tell anyone he was a Buddhist, but we read his facebook post after death, had to exhume the kid, add 4 items to the casket to go with the 4 elements of the Earth, rebury the kid, and get a Buddhist Master from the city.

It was too complicated for most of us but we like to be 'Thorough.' That's how the Boy Scouts got to earn community badges by filling brass carafes from the Last Supper, tossing them into the coffins with a lid, and then they had to string up the bells.

One of the kids going for his electronics badge had the clever idea to only let the bells ring in one place at a time. If Hilda had been buzzing "I'M ALIVE, I"M ALIVE" all night to all 200 families, I think we coule have just cut the wires and let us all get some sleep. Some people should stay dead like that.

Instead, I wsa trying to avoid cleaning the master bedroom. Even as a grown-arse-man the thought of spending hours to dust, vacuum, windows, hospital corners, fold clothes (My Lord, I'll just take those single use painter overalls of plastic). Except my kid is an environmentalist so I have to fold clothes for hours.

Yeah. I'll take a second job and get an Oh-Pare (Aupair, whateva) because you can run them at the federal wage and only let them out 2 weekends each months. It's like old school slaving for people that arrive from France.

Anyways, the red bar in the garage was blinking. I could see it from the second story master-bedroom-window because the other direction had laundry. "Oh my. That looks tantalizing."

A person needs an emergency excuse to get out of laundry with my wife. Dead People? Dead neighbor Hilda Benderhole was enough. For I am a man of caring.

Drove down to our cemetery, past the guard at the Solid Waste Landfill which is the only legal place our county allows dead people to remain. Showed the guard my shovel so I didn't have to weigh in and weigh out. It makes funeral processions very long. Especially if there is a person taking his wood scraps in a trailer but he hasn't covered his load; amateur. The funeral backs up all the way into highway 1 sometimes.

I'm trying to remember which plot is Hilda Benderhole, born in 1959, beloved person to someone, dead this day without children. The icon on her headstone is a flower. That's insane since we didn't give her any flowers because she said my dog deflowered her prcious flowers.

I take the pickaxe out of the truck. Hilda was a mean person and so we just put concrete over most of her body. Used the cheap six hundred dollar pine box because "the rental coffin" that is like a Cadillac of Aluminum at twelve thousand dollars and has a trap door on the bottom -- It wasn't natural enough for Mr. Benderhole.

We left the proper air gaps, which are a county regulation. Left the carafe of water, the Scouts set up the wire, and the mortician forgot to put a banana in her bum. Joe Benderhole was too cheap to pay for the banana. I suddenly realized that as I was sledging away on the sides of the tomb so that I didn't hit Hilda in the face directly. If anyone needed the banana, it was Hilda, because that woman must have woke up with a some terse words, and besides, even the homeless need to eat.

So I got a little air hole picked away. Because whoever 'touched it last' is responsible. (That's a real law in the trades. It's not just for kids anymore). I pecked the air hole so gently after getting half the sides done. It was a carefully timed event because the sound of that woman's voice makes me angry.

I said, "Hold your tongue for a few minutes. You don't want to distract me. This is neighbor Tommy. "

By her silence, she must have understood that there were residual feelings that must have came back to life when i found out she wasn't dead. Instead, she pushed a small knife through the air hole. It was that kind of knife that a person gets at the Dollar Fifty store. The kind that used to cost a dollar, before China and The Fed got together give people a bad day; inflation.

I didn't want to touch the thing. It was evidence. Evidence that Joe Benderhole was drinking his whip cream coffee too fast. He should have stabbed her deeper. "No one likes a half ass, Joe!"

Hilda, oh (sweet) Hildegard, the dearly departed, she wiggled that pumpkin carver knife over and over, obvious to anyone at the dump/graveyard that she wanted it out of her coffin/crypt. She wanted it into the hands of someone that should bring her justice.

I looked at my puppy dog that liked Hilda's Flowers so much. I let him come over to where I was working (because I whistled and he came) and then I put a little beef jerky from the pocket so he would stay in one place.

I said "deficate. DEF-I_CATE!" but the hound just looked like I was ordering him to do something that my wife would yell about.